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Earlier this year I attended my daughters National Dance Competition at Disney in Orlando. She is a high school senior, and this would be one of the last times I would watch her dance. She entered the competition with a severe case of tendonitis and swelling in her ankle and had not practiced for two weeks leading up to the competition.
After the first performance in preliminaries, she hobbled off the floor, clearly in pain. The decision was made to put her in a wheelchair for the remainder of the competition, but she would still dance. Her performance in prelims was shaky but good enough that her team made it to semi-finals.
In semi-finals, she danced very well, but the level of pain and discomfort she felt when it was over was apparent. If they made finals she wanted to dance, but the pain was intense, and her ability to perform at the level she needed to seemed unlikely.
Their semi-final performance earned them the right with eleven other teams to compete for the championship. My daughter needed to perform one last time.
The finals were exciting, and the arena at the ESPN Sports Complex in Disney was packed. As each team performed, their parents and supporters were allowed to kneel in front of the stage directly in front of them to cheer them on. Her team performed amazingly. Arguably the best they had performed all year and that included my daughter.
The girls, the parents, and the coaches knew it, and the level of pride and excitement in the hall waiting for them to emerge from backstage was palpable. They wheeled my daughter out first in her wheelchair. She had tears in her eyes as the supporters roared with praise and applause.
I knelt next to her as the rest of the team emerged and were engulfed by their friends and family. We embraced, and I began to cry uncontrollably.
I was overwhelmed with pride for her courage, her talent, her commitment and the sudden realization that because of this injury….this would be the last time I would ever watch her compete as a dancer. My mind raced back to when she was 6-years-old, and I took her to her first practice.
We were now both sobbing and visibly shaking behind our embrace. When I finally let go, I stepped back to allow her mother and others to congratulate her on her performance.
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As a man, this is a vulnerable place to be. Amongst hundreds of people, now standing alone, crying like a baby. I saw others staring at me, moms, other dads, people I did not know. No one approached me….it was as if their level of discomfort at seeing me cry was paralyzing to them.
I have always worn my emotions on my sleeve. Some are more acceptable to the traditional norms of masculinity than others. Anger…ok, happy…that works too, frustrated……of course, sadness…….um, wait a minute, that’s weakness, don’t be bringing that weak shit around here.
I used to wonder whether this made me weak and I guess I would be lying if I said there was probably a time I would have gone somewhere private to cry. But the conclusion I have come to is this. My ability to express my emotion without apology is perhaps one of the bravest things about me.
As men, we are often taught that crying or sadness is a weakness. Don’t ever let them see you cry….so we don’t. We fear what others will think. Women will see us as weak. Men will call us a pussy. Our masculinity is at stake, and the possible hit it may take is not worth the risk.
But here’s the rub about this mentality. It does not prevent the feelings from being there. We only become experts at hiding them. And we hide them because of our image and our fear of the damage a public display of emotion would do to that image.
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Consider this; courage is a function of fear. The more fear we have, the more courageous it is to act despite that fear. I see the suppression of emotion as an act of succumbing to fear, and succumbing to fear wreaks a lot more of weakness than facing it.
Don’t get me wrong; it can still be uncomfortable for me at times to show my emotion so publicly. But does it make me weak? That’s a hard construct to swallow.
The root of the word courage is cor which is the Latin word for heart. It is said that one of its earliest meanings was “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”
I’m afraid to do this….but I do it. And that is not weakness. That makes me one of the strongest men I know.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStockphoto